Jacobo Timerman's Preso sin nombre, celda sin numero and the reconstructing "I". (1).

?Alguien de ustedes miro alguna vez en los ojos a una persona, en el fondo de una celda, que sabe que va a morir aunque nadie se lo dijo? ... Tengo muchas de esas miradas clavadas en mi. (160)

Jacobo Timerman

Jacobo Timerman's Preso sin hombre, celda sin numero has been one of the most widely read and translated Argentine testimonial narratives from the Dirty War (1976-1983). Like many first person accounts, the book's main objective when it was first published in 1981 was to denounce the abuses suffered by the author and thousands of others during the dictatorship, it is necessary, however, to recognize the multiple possible readings of this text, particularly during the period of redemocratization when the denunciation of abuses converges with a personal and national desire to rebuild self and community. This study explores Timerman's text in an additional paradigmatic approach to reading testimonial narratives that would complement their reception as denunciations of human rights abuses. This may be accomplished by reading through the prism of historical memory as an organic process of the recreation of self.

Testimonial narratives necessitate a linguistic process of imagining and recreating that inverts and directly opposes a key aspect of political violence: the de(con)struction of the prisoner's voice. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry provides a detailed outline of this process of de(con)struction. Initially, the physical abuse that accompanies verbal interrogations during torture is in itself "language-destroying" (19). Furthermore, a prolonged interrogation "graphically objectifies the step-by-step backward movement along the path by which language comes into being and which is here being reversed or uncreated or deconstructed" (Scarry 20). The term "deconstruct" suggests the psychological taking apart of the subject. What remains is a broken prisoner whose body, voice and ideologies have all been violently abused. Thus, Scarry refers to torture as the "unmaking" of the victim's world, especially in relation to language.

This study considers Preso sin nombre, celda sin numero as a textual remaking of subjectivity and the victim's wor(l)d. Although one could argue that the eye (or the "I") cannot see or "gaze" upon itself, the language of testimony often resembles the creation of a mirror, a version of "reflection" of the self, imperfect in its distortions but necessary in the realization of identity. As Scarry so poignantly suggests:

 
   Physical pain is not only itself resistant to language but also actively 
   destroys language, deconstructing it into the pre-language of cries and 
   groans. To hear those cries is to witness the shattering of language. 
   Conversely, to be present when the person in pain rediscovers speech and so 
   regains his powers of self-objectification is almost to be present at the 
   birth, or rebirth, of language. (172) 

When the prisoner is not destroyed, which is often the effect of severe abuse--indicated by the number of "disappeared" in Argentina as in other nations--there exists the possibility of repositioning the self within the physical and verbal realities of that subject's world. This moment is compared by Scarry to the "birth of language itself." Furthermore, this rebirth of language, the formation of the wor(l)d after the traumatic experience is only possible through the use of the imagination and the reconstruction of the subject in relation to that wor(l)d that he or she remakes.